World Wide Words -- 15 Jun 02
Michael Quinion
DoNotUse at WORLDWIDEWORDS.ORG
Fri Jun 14 16:47:52 UTC 2002
WORLD WIDE WORDS ISSUE 293 Saturday 15 June 2002
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Editor: Michael Quinion, Thornbury, Bristol, UK ISSN 1470-1448
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Contents
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1. Feedback, notes and comments.
2. Turns of Phrase: Injecting room.
3. Weird Words: Preposterous.
4. Q&A: Butter no parsnips; Have your cake and eat it.
5. Endnote.
6. Subscription commands.
7. Contact addresses.
1. Feedback, notes and comments
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HONORIFICABILITUDINITATIBUS Following my Weird Words piece on this
last week, Professor Douglas Maurer wrote to point out that I had
missed a trick by not mentioning its supposed anagram: "Hi ludi, F.
Baconis nati, tuiti orbi". In English, this says: "These plays, F.
Bacon's offspring, are preserved for the world". This little gem of
misapplied cryptography was presented by Sir Edwin Lawrence-Durning
in his book "Bacon is Shakespeare" of 1910 as a hidden message left
by Francis Bacon, who (as some are still convinced) actually wrote
the plays usually attributed to Shakespeare. This is all nonsense,
of course - as every schoolboy knows, they were really written by
Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford. But the same set of letters, tested
in the common tongue, makes up "Inhibit in fabulous, idiotic art",
"Inhabit furious libido in attic", and "Hi! fabulous tit in idiotic
brain". What would Sir Edwin have made of these?
MAIL PROBLEMS Intermittent mail problems seem to be continuing at
my ISP, though firm evidence is hard to come by. If you e-mail me
and your message is rejected, please try sending another message
straightaway which contains the full text of the rejection notice.
The chances are high that a second attempt will get through. This
will give me ammunition to complain with.
2. Turns of Phrase: Injecting room
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This is a place where drug addicts, mainly those using heroin, are
able to inject fixes in safe conditions using sterile needles, with
medical attention and advice available if they need it. The aim is
not to condone drug use, but to reduce the incidence of diseases
like hepatitis transmitted by users sharing unclean needles, the
risk of dying of an overdose, and the nuisance caused by addicts
shooting up in public. The term seems from the written evidence to
have first appeared in Australia at the end of the last decade,
where it has since become well known, and where a debate is now
taking place on legalising them following a trial of one in Sydney
sanctioned by government. It has now travelled to the UK and is
likely to become known here, since it was used last month in an
important report on drugs policy by the Parliamentary Home Affairs
Select Committee.
Australia's first medically supervised injecting room managed 250
heroin overdoses in its first year but not one was fatal, a report
out this morning says. And fears of a honey-pot effect - where the
centre would attract drug dealers and cause a rise in local crime -
have proved baseless.
["Sydney Morning News", May 2002]
To reduce the harm caused by heroin use we have recommended a
network of safe injecting rooms where chaotic users can inject
safely, where needles can be disposed of and where those interested
can get access to help.
[Chris Mullin, Chairman, Home Affairs Select
Committee, in the "Guardian", May 2002]
3. Weird Words: Preposterous
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Contrary to reason or common sense; utterly absurd or ridiculous.
To the dismay of those few surviving writers on language who like
to argue sense from etymology, this word no longer quite means what
its Latin precursor says it ought. It appeared in English in the
sixteenth century, derived from Latin "praeposterus", which is made
up of "prae", before, plus "posterus", coming after, so meaning
something reversed (and hence nonsensical).
In the middle of the nineteenth century it attracted the ire of the
philologist Richard Chenevix Trench, who was at various times Dean
of Westminster and Archbishop of Dublin, but is much better known
to dictionary makers as the man who put forward the original idea
for the "Oxford English Dictionary".
He argued in his book "English Past and Present" that the term
strictly refers to something that is absurd because the true order
of things has been reversed: "It is 'preposterous,' in the most
accurate use of the word, to put the cart before the horse, to
expect wages before the work is done, to hang a man first and try
him afterwards; and in this strict and accurate sense the word was
always used by our elder writers". He lamented that the word had
been debased by sloppy writers to the point at which "It is now no
longer of any practical service at all in the language, being
merely an ungraceful and slipshod synonym for absurd".
Dean Chenevix Trench may have been one of the founders of modern
linguistics, but here he makes the same mistake as earlier writers
on language who felt that words ought always to mean what their
Latin originals meant and that change always implies decay. Sadly
for him, his most famous inspiration, the OED, eventually refuted
him. It records that the sense of something absurd was first used
by Nicholas Udall in 1542, in his English translation of the works
of Erasmus, ten years before the first example of the sense Trench
regarded as the only proper one.
4. Q&A
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Q. Lazing about the other day, I said, "this will butter no
parsnips" But I have no idea of its derivation. Please help.
[Malcolm Anderson]
A. It's interesting that you should use the phrase to refer to
idleness, since its usual associations are with honeyed words. The
full expression is "fine words butter no parsnips" (or sometimes
"soft words ..." or "fair words ..."), meaning that words alone are
useless, especially flattering phrases or fine promises, and you
should judge people by what they do rather than by what they say.
Apart from that, there's not a lot more that one can say apart from
"origin unknown". It's a proverb, which is at least 400 years old:
the first example given in the big "Oxford English Dictionary" is
dated 1639: "Faire words butter noe parsnips".
The link between butter and flattery is easy to understand. We have
had the verb "to butter up", to flatter someone lavishly, in the
language at least since the early eighteenth century. It and the
proverb share the image of fine words being liberally applied to
smooth their subject and oil the process of persuasion. Parsnips
were featured in the proverb early on because they were common in
the English diet and were usually buttered before being put on the
table. (Nothing particularly special about that, however: foreign
visitors often commented in disgust at the English habit of using
butter to cook almost everything.)
Nigel Rees, in "Oops, Pardon Mrs Arden!", quotes a stanza from
"Epigrammes" of 1651 by a Thames waterman, John Taylor, who was
known as the Water Poet:
Words are but wind that do from men proceed;
None but Chamelions on bare Air can feed;
Great men large hopeful promises may utter;
But words did never Fish or Parsnips butter.
This shows that other foodstuffs were involved in the saying at
that time - indeed there's an example in the OED from 1645: "Fair
words butter no fish" - and that it's the act of buttering that's
the key part of the saying. The association solely with parsnips
results from the expression having become fossilised in that one
form at some point.
-----------
Q. We are perplexed by the confusing phrase "have your cake and eat
it". I have always thought this a common misconception and it
should be "eat your cake and have it"? [Colin Rogers; Alison Braid-
Skolski]
A. Whoever expected English idioms to be logical? The usual way in
which one sees this one is as the negative "you can't have your
cake and eat it", expressing the idea that you have to make an
either/or choice, that it isn't possible to reconcile two mutually
incompatible situations. It would be a little clearer if it were
written as "you can't *both* have your cake and eat it". It would
be more obviously the same as the other form if you also rewrote
that as "you can't eat your cake and *still* have it".
Quite why the saying has settled on this form isn't clear. In my
youth I learned it as "you can't eat your cake and have it, too",
and there are more examples in my databases that way than in the
"can't have your cake and eat it" inversion. Those who first used
it certainly agreed with your sense of logic. Though presumably
rather older, it is first written down in John Heywood's "A
Dialogue Conteynyng Prouerbes and Epigrammes" of 1562: "Wolde ye
bothe eate your cake, and haue your cake?". John Keats quoted it as
"eat your cake and have it" at the beginning of his poem "On Fame"
in 1816; Franklin D Roosevelt borrowed it in that form for his
State of the Union Address in 1940; a search of nineteenth-century
literature shows it to be about twice as common as the other. But a
quick Google search shows the "have your cake and eat it" form is
now about ten times as frequent, and all my dictionaries of idioms
and proverbs cite it that way.
One of life's little mysteries, I suppose. But whichever way you
say it, you can be sure that it will be understood. So there's no
need to worry much over the logic or the order!
5. Endnote
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"Some guy hit my fender the other day, and I said unto him, 'Be
fruitful and multiply.' But not in those words." [Woody Allen,
quoted in B Adler and J Feinman, "Woody Allen: Crown Prince of
American Humor" (1976).]
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